Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

AMD’s CPU Warranty RMA website SUCKS!

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

It sucks so bad! I’ve spent a good two hours trying to RMA an AMD CPU (Yes, I actually had a CPU go bad I’ve never heard of a CPU going bad before. I’ve always thought that CPUs are either good or bad but they don’t go bad,  apparently I was wrong. It was only a partial failure too, which added to the weirdness)

  • Problem 1: Requires IE (firefox and chrome both don’t work, important buttons and check-boxes fail to respond), the site recommend IE 5.x-6.x
  • Problem 2: IE 6.0 doesn’t work either. There are buttons that I can see in firefox, that I can’t see in IE 6, but are referred to on the site so I know they should be there.
  • Problem 3: The site is horribly written. The overall design isn’t that bad, but the usability is terrible, if you decide you want to change something, you usually have to start almost all over again. Twice I ran into an error that change my address so that I lived in Michigan, Afghanistan.
  • Problem 4: I can’t actually submit my RMA: I finally get to the last step and slick “next” and I get: “Error, RMA request could not be submitted” with no information about what caused it or what to do next.

This is inexcusable. I’ve seen better/more functional websites written by grade schoolers!

Now I actually have to call AMD, and I’m not going to be happy.

UPDATE: While their RMA website sucks calling them wasn’t that bad. I had an RMA number in about 4 minutes. Hmmm although I should have gotten an email from them by now…

UPDATE 2: 24 hours and still no email. Called them again. Apparently email was never sent. This time the sent it and I got it in a couple minutes. Hopefully the rest of this process will be more straightforward.

Why Perl is Bad

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

print localtime();
Output:
5650104510831551

A half hour later…

$var = localtime();
print $var;

Output:
Wed Jun 4 10:50:56 2008

Enough Said…

Journals Suck

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

So today I ran across an article on slashdot about free will.

Apparently some scientists were able to use fMRI machines to predict an outcome of a choice, made by a human test subject, up to seven seconds before the test subject thought he/she was making the choice. The article said this posed serious problems for the idea of free will.

I am a bit skeptical. It seems like the only thing they’ve been able to show is that our perception of how we make our choices is flawed. Not that we are not “really” making choices. And what about choices that I am presented with and react to in less than 7 seconds?

So anyway, I was trying to go see if this experiment addressed this problem and if so how. I searched Google and found numerous press releases similar to the Wired article but nothing specific to speak to actual test procedures or the condition under which the experiment was performed or anything like that. I found the journal article in which the experiment is published. The article was published in Nature: Neuroscience and can be found online here.

However, in order to see anything more than the abstract, I need to pay either $32 for the article, or $225 for a yearly subscription!!! 
My only other option is to go down to a nearby university and look up the article in their library, an hour+ trip and I don’t have the time. So I cannot even look at the article! (without paying what I think is a ridiculous price for something that the author gets zero profit for) I have no idea what it actually says!
This really bugs me. There is no easy way for the general public to have access to scientific information. I have wanted access to other journals for various reasons, and for all of them I’ve either had to pay exorbitant prices, or access them in a university library.

Scientists form committees to try to figure out why the public is so uninformed! Hey, I know why! We don’t have access to scientific information!! Why does the general public thing that global warming is not that big of an issue? Because the best accessible source of scientific information is CNN!!

Hey and I even have a solution. Make journal access free! Make some form of expert moderated wiki (most journals are moderated by experts in the field anyway, not by journal employees (and they usually don’t get paid for it either )) and post scientific papers there.

So yeah…That bothers me quite a bit. I think I might have to go do something about it…